In his COMDEX keynote address, Andy Grove, president and CEO of Intel Corporation, predicts that the computer of the year 2011 will have one billion transistors (based on .07 micron technology), run at 10 GHz, and process 100 billion instructions per second. Such a PC would be 250 times more powerful than today's top-of-the-line Pentium Pro machines, in a little over a decade."

The new chip has 8-12 core processors. This parallel processing allows the overall chip to exceed Andy's prediction of 10 GHz by splitting work between the core processors.

I couldn't find a direct comparison regarding computer instructions per second because the new chips are rated in Gigaflops.

So Andy was a little conservative on his predictions (although the currently released i7 chips are very close).

What does this mean? Computers are still getting faster. It is our challenge to figure out how to use all that power effectively to help with the work of the courts. For some possible examples of how this might be headed, Microsoft issued this video on their user interface work (3.5 minutes) that takes advantage of the increasing computing power.